It is known to provide in-vehicle entertainment and/or control to users by means of user equipment such as portable personal devices, including: cell phones, tablet PCs, etc. In such scenarios, typically an application is executed by the user equipment. The application provides features to the user which relate to the in-vehicle entertainment and/or the control of various functionality of the vehicle. Features may relate to output of information to the user and input of information from the user.
Here it may be desirable to provide different features to different users. E.g., more or less or different features should be available to the driver of the vehicle if compared to rear-seat passengers of the vehicle. In other words, the access granted or denied to certain features may depend on the user of the user equipment. This need for user-dependent access to features may have its origin in legal aspects such as a limited cognitive load imposed to the driver, usability, e.g., providing a simplified view to the driver to facilitate easy access to functions, and localization, e.g., allowing rear-seat passengers local entertainment properties affecting the rear-seat seating positions only.
In order to provide such a user-dependent access to features, it is known to provide different applications which can be selectively executed by the user equipment. E.g., a first application is provided for the driver and a second application is provided for the rear-seat passengers; the first and second applications provide access to different features. It would also be possible to provide a plurality of user equipment within a vehicle such that different passengers of the car may use different user equipment where the different applications are executed.
However, such a solution faces certain restrictions. E.g., provisioning a plurality of user equipment and/or applications may increase the hardware and/or software development costs. Further, the system complexity may increase; e.g., it may be necessary to establish a connection between the vehicle and a plurality of user equipment, respectively between the vehicle and a plurality of applications.
Therefore, a need exists to provide a less complex and simplified control of a user equipment for in-vehicle entertainment and/or control. In particular, a need exists for control of a user equipment for in-vehicle entertainment and/or control which allows enabling or disabling access to certain features in dependence of the various users.